The Rio Olympic Games also celebrated and showcased sport, thanks to the city’s stunning setting and a desire to lift event presentation to new heights. Located inside the Barra Olympic Park, the Olympic Tennis Centre was one of the most important venues of the games. The structural project was very hard to design and it was necessary to find engineering solutions with the ability to combine practicality, economy, versatility and quality.

Aligned to these concepts, the use of precast elements plays an essential role and has been gaining its fair share of the market; however, the connection of the elements in the structure is still debated amongst engineers and the application of mechanical couplers to connect reinforcing rebar is commonly used as a solution to solve this issue. This paper presents a case study about a threaded coupler application with the main purpose to connect precast beams and columns of the Olympic Tennis Centre in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Through the use of previous studies, developing the proper connection specifications for ductility and strength, installation procedures and a high effort in quality control prove that mechanical couplers are an economical alternative for making connections in large precast structures and were well designed and applied on this project.